A couple of years ago, Ola Jeppsson started working on a 1024-core simulator as part of his Master’s Thesis at Chalmer’s University in Sweden. (advisor, Sally McKee). He picked up the project again in 2016 as part of the validation process of the 1024-core Epiphany-V.
Debugging with the simulator is an order of magnitude easier than with hardware, so you should always verify your programs in simulation before trying them out on hardware. You might still have synchronization bugs, but at least you can check if your program is “generally working”.
Key Features:
- Small footprint (1024 cores runs on laptop with 16GB RAM)
- Directly callable from ESDK (thus VERY easy to use!)
- Supports printing and flexible memory maps (ie you can cheat with program sizes)
The free open source package is included pre-installed in the latest 2016.11 release. Ola has also put together a short simulator tutorial to get people started. Feedback appreciated.
Cheers,
Andreas
